Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times

Each generation produces a powerful new teacher with a healing message on loss -- the mystery and difficulty that no one can avoid. The seventies produced Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. The eighties gave us Harold S. Kushner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People. The nineties offer us David J. Wolpe, a rabbi whose eloquence, experience, intellect, and heart bring a new understanding of finding faith and creating meaning in difficult times.

It was the loss that surrounded Wolpe -- his father's father whom he never met, his mother's speech lost to a stroke, not being able to have more children, the relatives, the dreams, the love, the life -- that led him to become a rabbi. He did this not to ask why we lose so much, but how we can use the inevitable appearance of loss in our lives as a source of strength rather than a source of despair. "Could I, " he asked, "with the power of my own hand and heart, turn a painful, inexplicable loss into a generator of purpose and of hope?" The answer is a resounding "yes." Making Loss Matter is a beautifully written book that shares the wisdom of ancient stories, great rabbis, poets, philosophers and David's own experience as a rabbi, a son, a grandson, a husband, and a father to show us how to find faith in difficulty -- the faith, hope, and purpose which helps us survive.